Crinum Lily

his

may turn out to be an all-lily month for  my Friday Floral pics. I nearly waited too long for this weeks gem, but I knew I had a very narrow window on the Lycoris last week, and decided to push it back till this week. The Crinum lily, Crinum sp. is made up of a number of species that readily interbreed. This promiscuous behavior makes identifying parentage very difficult, often impossible. The one Crinum we have, C. ‘Ellen Bosanquet’, is no exception. It was hybridized in Florida in the 1920’s by a plant breeder, Louis Bosanquet, which he named in honor of his wife, Ellen. To this day nobody is sure of the parentage, and to date no one has been able to recreate this hybrid with any known combination of species and/or varieties. Wow! Mystery in the front yard!

And don’t you just love the way the buds in this first shot are lined up in the queue? Unfortunately, the down side is that the spent blooms don’t fall off by themselves, and increasingly take away from what was a beautiful beginning. A good gardener will go around and snip out the spent blooms every day. Yeah, right. Notice in the second shot the stubs below the main bloom. This cluster is nearly spent.

More closely related to amaryllis than lily, all in the genus Crinum are tough, pest-resistant plants. They are usually listed as hardy to zone 7, which makes them technically half a zone shy of the Tulsa area. We have never had a hint of trouble here, and these bulbs are planted well away from the house, so they are not benefiting from winter house heat. Back in the seventies the USDA realigned the hardiness zones and I think there is a bit of confusion in the nursery trade; some growers using the old charts, some the new. That’s how I explain it. The foliage is a rosette tropical-like floppiness, reaching about two foot high. The flower stalks stand almost a foot taller.

Rain is forecast for this weekend, so if you can get out in it, do so. See you in church on Sunday.